OTTAWA — In the early 2000s, the company then known as Corel fell off the radar. Now CEO Christa Quarles wants to send it back into the sky, with a different call sign.

In its heyday, Corel was a Canadian challenger to Microsoft and key to Ottawa’s idea of itself as Silicon Valley North. It’s been bought out, taken public, taken private again, repurposed and sold. But after all that, it’s still recognizable as the software company its swashbuckling CEO Michael Cowpland founded in 1985.

Renamed Alludo as of mid-September—that’s a play on “all you do,” though it’s pronounced “ah-LOO-doh”—its new pitch is that it “liberates people and organizations from everyday constraints to reimagine where, when, and how we work.”

“We have this belief that if you work better, your life is better,” Quarles told The Logic in an interview. “You come home better, or you are home already, and you are better because you feel fulfilled and energized by the work that you’re doing.”

This idea is a new wrapper around a pack of more-or-less familiar products: the company’s longtime namesake and flagship design program CorelDraw (whose name isn’t changing), word-processor WordPerfect, emulator Parallels, visualizing tool MindManager, file compressor WinZip and an assortment of others.

Quarles described the company she came into as “a very mouldable lump of clay.” She admitted she had no idea that Corel owned Parallels as well as MindManager and WinZip.

In her telling, these disparate applications help with a sequence of creativity and productivity: “Enable, ideate, create, share.” Now, she said, Alludo will strive to make its software excel at these things, securely, wherever users happen to be using it.

Earlier this year, for instance, it bought Awingu, a Belgian company whose product, in a nutshell, allows remote access to company software via a web browser. Just about any browser—even on the screen in a Tesla, Quarles said. It’s being integrated into the Parallels family.

Quarles and the company have been developing the idea that Corel/Alludo’s software enables productivity for remote work since she became CEO in September 2020. She was recruited to the job, after previously heading restaurant-reservation service OpenTable, by Corel’s private-equity owner, KKR. It had bought Corel in 2019 from its previous private-equity owner, Vector Capital, for a reported US$1-billion-plus, and wanted to do more with it than Vector did.

“There was a bit of hibernation that occurred, because if you looked at the mandate of the business, it was really a bit more short-term oriented. It was: ‘Don’t take a lot of risk, extract the cash flow you can from the business, [but] don’t meaningfully invest, either,” she said.

Corel was once a Canadian tech titan and it loomed especially large in Ottawa, with its name on the Senators’ hockey arena and a prominent office building. Nortel was a lot bigger but Corel had glitz, in the persons of Michael Cowpland and his wife Marlen.

Michael had already made one fortune as a co-founder of Mitel, along with fellow tycoon Terry Matthews. The Cowplands lived in Ottawa’s most expensive house. He drove a Lamborghini. Marlen became a patron of fashion designer Richard Robinson, who made her a leather catsuit with a golden half-bustier featuring a diamond nipple. She dyed her Maltese and had a TV show about celebrities’ pets.

Cowpland’s personal flamboyance matched his business style. In 1996, after CorelDraw established itself as the Windows answer to Adobe’s Macintosh graphics programs, Cowpland used some of the company’s riches to buy WordPerfect and a family of other business programs, including the spreadsheet application Quattro.

WordPerfect, the formerly dominant word-processing software, had been losing ground to Microsoft Word and was proving a bad fit for its owner, Novell, whose core business was networking and which had bought it only a couple of years before.

The US$186-million deal was not a winner for Corel, either. It lost nearly $232 million in 1997, on $261 million in sales. The losses turned into a small profit by 1999, but sales slipped to $243 million.

The following year, Cowpland resigned amid allegations he’d sold millions of dollars of Corel shares in advance of a bad 1997 financial report. His holding company paid $575,000 to settle charges brought by the Ontario Securities Commission.

(Cowpland went on to run Zim Corp. starting in 2001, selling “software products and services for the database and mobile markets.” In 2020, Zim sold those properties to employees and refashioned itself as an investment vehicle for biomedical products; the company now has no staff.)

In 2003, Vector Capital bought Corel for US$124 million and the hush descended. The company still sold its software but became much less flashy.

“A lot of times, the product brand was stronger than the parent,” said Rob Charlebois, who joined Corel during the quiet period. He began as an e-commerce manager in 2005 and ultimately became executive vice-president of global digital marketing and self-serve sales. He was there in 2006, when Corel’s name came off the Ottawa Senators’ arena and the rink became Scotiabank Place. (It’s now the Canadian Tire Centre.)

The sponsorship “didn’t make sense for the economics but [giving up the naming rights] also meant a lot of people thought we were gone,” Charlebois said.

The same year, Vector oversaw a limited and disappointing IPO, a move it reversed in 2009.

Under Vector, Charlebois said, Corel became a sort of acquisition platform for private-equity investments in underperforming software companies.

“We had, at least in my realm, a set of tools and tactics to make digital marketing more effective, so they could acquire customers at a faster rate and just make e-commerce better,” Charlebois said. The engineering side had its own playbook, speeding up development and keeping to more rigid release schedules. Corel had sales channels to push newly acquired products into, and could cut redundant administration.

“Vector looked at us as a great opportunity to bring in companies, buy them, tune them up, and create more value for the whole.”

The result was not necessarily a set of properties making up a coherent vision. Some of the acquisitions fit into the idea of empowering creative workers, Charlebois said. “But there were some that were just no-brainers on the opportunity to drive efficiencies and larger profit.”

He differs with Quarles’s assessment that the company had been in hibernation. Corel didn’t make very big changes while Vector prepared to sell it, he acknowledged, but that was a temporary condition. And even so, it invested in a Macintosh port of CorelDraw and some smaller “smart bets in the areas that matter.”

Charlebois left—on good terms, he said; after 16 years it was just time for a change—amid an overhaul of the C-suite that means only one of five top executives, CFO Bradley Jewett, predates Quarles’s arrival. They are scattered across the continent: Quarles is in California and others oversee their staffs from Washington and New York states.

“I needed to get new people into the organization, who are willing to look at these assets in a totally different way than the people who were running them for the last 10 or 15 years,” Quarles said. “Everybody wants transformation and nobody wants change.”

Headquarters remains in Ottawa, though, in the same copper-hued office building where Cowpland once reigned, though with the sign no longer on the side. About half the company’s staff (750 full-time, plus contractors) are in North America, with a heavy emphasis on Ottawa, where the teams behind CorelDraw, Corel Painter and WordPerfect are centered.

That said, 95 per cent of Corel’s staff work from home, according to the company’s figures. “I onboarded in the middle of the pandemic,” Quarles said. “If you had asked me in 2019, ‘Would you drive a remote-first organization?’ I would have been like, ‘Absolutely not.’”

But, she said, years of growing by buying meant Corel/Alludo had teams scattered all around the world. Head office was in Ottawa, sure, but Parallels came out of Seattle; MindManager came from Germany. Charlebois started in Ottawa but moved to Connecticut, where WinZip is based, and then to Texas.

Now the pandemic has made remote work commonplace, and Alludo is, to use one of Quarles’s favoured phrases, leaning in. It wants ongoing relationships with customers, and to get more of them buying subscriptions rather than making one-time purchases of software in a plastic-wrapped box, or the 2022 digital-download equivalent.

The company is staffing up in Mauritius—an island in the Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar, which is trying to fashion itself into a Singapore of Africa. These are Alludo employees, Quarles stressed, not operators in some contract call centre.

“If you think about this belief system around, ‘Hey, we’ve got to develop these recurring relationships,’ we can no longer shuttle off our customer support to a third-party entity who doesn’t care about our customers the same way an employee would,” she said.

Alludo might keep buying other companies, but not for the same reasons Corel did, Quarles added. The Awingu acquisition is an example of the different approach.

“I think the piece that’s largely changed is: how do all these pieces fit together from a strategic standpoint? We’re not going to just buy some random piece of software, necessarily, even if it’s cash-generative, if it doesn’t go back to serving our mission.”